Ravenous Intruder
A 1/2 for two mana that eats your own artifacts to grow answers a recurring red design puzzle: how to reward an aggressive artifact deck for flooding the board with cheap permanents without turning the payoff into a fragile build-around. The solution here is a repeatable sacrifice outlet welded to a body cheap enough to slot in anywhere, so the value lives entirely in what you feed it. Each artifact converts into a one-turn +2/+2 at instant speed, which means the Gremlin's ceiling is capped by how many disposable artifacts you can spare in a single turn: Servos, Thopters, Treasure, a spent piece of Equipment. That flexibility cuts both ways, since every pump permanently surrenders a permanent, so the card starves the moment you have nothing left worth throwing away. The instant-speed timing is the wrinkle that earns it a combat role: hold the pump to ambush an incoming blocker, or fire it after attackers are declared to shove through lethal, collapsing a board of tokens into one threatening point of damage. This is a redundancy piece for an artifact-sacrifice shell rather than its engine, a creature whose whole identity is the exchange rate between your junk and your clock.


